A crowded Marriott Center, packed full of buzzing BYU students, faculty and other listeners, immediately turned silent the moment President Dallin H. Oaks was spotted walking into the arena to deliver his first devotional address as the recently called prophet and president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
President Oaks warmly greeted the thousands of students and others present by gently raising his two hands, clasped, and turning a full 360 degrees to see students wave back at him.
“It is good to be here,” the new prophet said as he opened his address — the first devotional to be delivered at BYU by a church president since 2019.
As a former president of the university (serving from 1971-1980), President Oaks acknowledged he has spoken to many BYU audiences, but never before as the leader of the church.
“You are an audience greatly loved by the Lord,” he said, “and he desires all of you to return to his presence.”
President Oaks recognized BYU is celebrating its 150th anniversary, and noted that he was president of the university when the school celebrated its 100th anniversary and the late church President Spencer W. Kimball delivered his “historic second century address.”
“That second century is now half over,” President Oaks said, then inviting listeners to consider what they and the university have become as they have sought to achieve past prophets’ “prophetic challenges.”
“I firmly believe that it is the destiny of Brigham Young University to become what past and present prophets knew it could become,” he declared. “With the consecration and leadership of this community, BYU will become the great university of the Lord — not in the world’s way but in the Lord’s way.”
In his address, President Oaks also spoke of the importance of combining secular and spiritual learning, saying that secular learning alone is limiting and that there is no “ultimate conflict” between learning through spiritual methods and the “evolving disclosures of the scientific method.”
President Oaks’ teachings on spiritual and secular learning mirrored those of President Kimball in his second century address, which charged the university’s students and faculty to become “bilingual” in the languages of secular and “spiritual things.”
One of the many reasons church members will need the constant, guiding influence of the Holy Ghost, President Oaks also taught, is because the “adversary has become so effective at disguising truth, that if you don’t have the Holy Ghost, you will be deceived.”
President Oaks expressed his desire to help church members overcome both their “present or future doubts,” saying that whatever those doubts may be, the “way to overcome them is to get closer to our Savior, Jesus Christ.”
Take care not to become distracted, he urged, promising God is in “relentless pursuit of each of you.”
President Oaks and the late President Jeffrey R. Holland of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles shared a similarly introspective conversation about BYU students’ “spiritual obligation” and the university’s past half-century in a video released by the church in November 2025.
“Now, (BYU) is a university — we come there to study and to (earn) degrees, and it is everything from art to zoology,” President Holland said then. “But running through it is a foundation and a theme that these are children of God. We are to teach them for eternity — ‘education for eternity’ was a phrase that we used.”